Long Live the Glorious May 7 Directive – Books on Books #20

Carol Yinghua Lu, Liu Ding & Shuxia Chen

Hardcover |  19.05 x 1.91 x 24.77 cm | 140 pp

Errata Editions | 2017 | 9781935004424

Published in 1971, Long Live the Glorious May 7 Directive is one of the key propaganda photobooks of Chairman Mao Zedong’s infamous Cultural Revolution. Illustrated with both colour and black-and-white photographs taken by uncredited photographers, the book extolls the virtues of Mao’s communist ideology and purports to document the joyful, industrious effects of these ideas in action.

Smiling workers and peasants read together from Mao’s Little Red Book of quotations, stalwart soldiers march in unending ranks and Chinese fighter pilots conquer the open skies. Of course, history remembers the realities of Mao’s Cultural Revolution quite differently.

Long Live the Glorious May 7 Directive is now extremely rare; Errata Editions’ Books on Books 20 presents this fascinating volume in its entirety with essays by Liu Ding, Carol Yinghua Lu and Shuxia Chen.

Errata Editions Books on Books

The Errata Editions Books on Books series is an on-going publishing project dedicated to making rare and out-of-print photography books accessible to students and photobook enthusiasts. These are not reprints nor facsimiles but comprehensive studies of rare books. Each in this series presents the entire content, page for page, of an original master bookwork which, up until now, has been too rare or prohibitively expensive for most to experience. Through a mix of classic and contemporary titles, this series spans the breadth of photographic practice as it has appeared on the printed page, enabling further study into the creation and meanings of these great works of art.

Each in the Books on Books series contains; illustrations of every page in the original photobook being featured; contemporary essays by established writers on photography composed specially for this series; production notes about the production of the original edition; biography and bibliography information about each artist.

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